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YokimaSun writes "Following on from Last months Mega auction of rare games that went for a staggering 1.2 Million dollars, comes another auction. This time its of the only Legend of Zelda Nes Prototype cartridge in the world, bundled with it is a sealed copy of the retail version of the game, those of you excited by this news will have to dig deep because the price is set at a mouthwatering US $150,000.00."

It's probably NOT that prototype, since they stated in the auction that there are no apparent differences that they've seen between it and the final release version. I'd imagine that the missing prologue of the prototype you linked would have stood out. Also, his prototype is stamped NOA for Nintendo of America, and, I believe, has been localized into English, whereas the prototype you've linked is in Japanese. It sounds like his is a much later prototype and from a different branch of the company.

It's not a test cart, it's a prototype. As they pointed out if you read through the questions and follow some of the links, the PCB for this cart is unlike any of the ones ever seen in a test cart. Externally it looks similar. Internally it's anything but. Hence why it's being billed as unique.

Several posters pointed out that the description seems to be for a newer Zelda game, not the original Legend of Zelda. This isn't because the seller put in incorrect info, but because there's a problem with the stock eBay description. Whenever you sell a video game on eBay, the selling tool will beg you to select the game from eBay's internal database and hassle you if you don't. This database information contains stuff like name, release date, and a short description (the part which was botched here). It also sometimes contains stock photos, which can be (and usually are) deleted and overridden by whoever is posting the listing.

eBay does the same thing with books and other media as well. You can see this by going to "Sell an item" and entering the media name in the box labeled "Enter a UPC, ISBN, VIN VIN help or keywords that describe your item." There are about 500 entries containing the phrase "Legend of Zelda", so it's not surprising that there might be some corrupted entries and/or duplicates in there.

That's getting pretty close to perfect, but I think some of the tricky part is not just emulating the console hardware, but the interface with the analog world, which you can get even with a literally exact emulation.

For example, one of the most common aesthetic flaws in emulators is audio aliasing. If you take the Atari 2600's sound chip, it outputs square waves directly to line-out, because it's a super-cheap chip that is literally a digital circuit (alternating high and low voltages) plugged into analog audio out. Its operation has been reverse engineered so it's emulated bit- and cycle-perfectly by most Atari emulators. But the sound in most of them is still wrong, because when you generate square waves digitally as PCM audio, as opposed to plugging a circuit directly into an analog line-out, you get pretty bad aliasing. Digitally generating unaliased (band-limited) square waves is actually a fairly complex problem, with a bunch of research papers about it. This guy [slack.net] has been trying to get code into some emulators to do it.

That's just one example, but the observation is that you have to do more than a literal simulation of the original hardware to get it to be a good emulation, sometimes, in this case dealing with the fact that digital simulation of audio-generating chips is inherently different from running those chips to analog audio output.